A self-adhesive hair band comprising the features of the preamble of claim 1 is known from European Patent Application Publication EP 1 642 510 A1. Here, the hairs are knotted together in strands of hair. The knots of the strands of hair are located at the back side of an elastic foil made of polyurethane through which the hairs of the strands of hair extend. The hairs are glued to the foil both at the back side and the front side of the foil. A double-faced adhesive tape is provided at the back side of this hair band, which, at its one face, is glued to the foil or to the knotted ends of the strands of hair glued to the foil, and which, at its other face, serves for gluing the hair band to natural hairs of bearer of a hair extension, for example.
Due to the knots of the strands of hair glued to the back side of the foil, the known hair band is comparatively thick, particularly if interspaces between the individual knots are filled with glue to achieve a homogenous thickness of the hair band. Further, the production of the known hair band is comparatively laborious as it requires a lot of manual work. The external optical appearance of the hair band does not correspond to the natural appearance of the human scalp due to the hair emerging out of the foil in strands, and due to the coverage of the hairs with glue even on the front side of the foil.
A further hair band is known from German Utility Model DE 20 2005 010 845 U1. Here, the hairs are glued in parallel side by side to an adhesive tape extending at a right angle to the hairs over the entire width of the adhesive tape. At the outside of this known hair band, the hairs are covered with a matte cover layer, and, if they are made of natural hair, they are provided with an anti-hygroscopic sealing in the area in which they are glued to the adhesive tape. At the other face of the adhesive tape, the known hair band may be directly glued to the hairs of the bearer of a hair extension. The adhesive layer provided here may be exchanged. This known hair band has a very flat design, and it does also only require a comparatively low effort in production, but it does also not have the appearance of a naturally haired human scalp.
Further, hair bands are known in which single hairs are knitted to a carrier netting. At its back side, the carrier netting may be glued to an intermediate foil to which a double-faced adhesive tape may be attached. In any case, knitting the hairs to the netting is extremely laborious, and does also result in an opposite orientation of the end of each hair which is bent in knitting. Here, the scales of the hair of natural hair have an opposite orientation to the scales of the desired long hair section and of the naturally existing hair of a bearer of a hair extension, and thus result in a tendency of matting of the hairs adjacent to the hair band. Further, the effective thickness of the hair band is high due to the connections of the hairs to the netting, and cutting the netting in arbitrary dimensions is not possible without endangering its integrity. At a closer look, it is also obvious that the hairs individually knitted to the netting do not provide the impression of a naturally haired human scalp.
With a large area hair replacement it is known to stitch hairs through a flexible but non-elastic PVC-foil which is formed to comply with the head form of a bearer of the hair replacement, and to glue the hairs over a greater length at the back side of the PVC-foil between the PVC-foil and an underlying cover foil. It is well known that this way of attaching the hairs is only used with artificial hair, as with natural hair there is a danger of the hairs getting loose upon absorbing moisture due to the hygroscopicity of the hairs.
With so-called training heads with natural hair it is known to stitch single hairs through the outer wall of the respective training head and to fix longer sections of the hair at the inside of this wall by means of a polyurethane foam.
A method of making wigs in which the hair is secured by a glue is known from German Patent DE 365 353 A. Here, the hairs are individually pulled through two textile layers serving as a carrier. At the back side of the inner textile layer the hairs are put together and glued to the inner textile layer by means of a resin-containing binder. The resin layer is then covered by means of a textile layer. The outer of the two textile layers serving as the carrier suitably consists of silk gauze which may be voluntarily covered according to the scalp color to be achieved. The inner textile layer consists of fish skin, a membrane made from animal origin which keeps back the binder and which is water-tight. Due to the ends of the hairs which are arranged one atop the other at the back side, this method is not suited for the manufacture of narrow hair bands. On the one hand, the hairs, in their direction of main extension, run through the textile layers serving as the carrier and at the back side of these textile layers over a distance which is greater than the width of a typical hair band. At the other hand, the multi-layered construction and the hairs lying atop the other at the back side of the carrier structure result in a considerable thickness of the known wig, that goes far beyond the tolerable thickness of a hair band which is to be attached to the natural hair of a bearer without causing attention.
A hair piece is known from U.S. Pat. No. 4,456,019, in which the hairs extend through a carriers structure in an U-bend and are glued to the back side of the carrier structure via the middle section of their U-bend. This results in a short fixation length and thus in an overall thin construction of the known hair piece. However, the hairs, in the main direction, extend from the hair piece with different running directions, i.e. with different orientations of the hair scales in natural hair. This results in an early matting of the hairs.
There still is the need of a hair band, which, on the one hand, can be manufactured at acceptable efforts, and which, on the other hand, has an external appearance which comes as close as possible to the naturally haired human scalp.